Bloom

Sarah Westcott’s poems are an enquiry into perception, in which looking is refracted, and the line between subject and object becomes permeable. They look back to a time when “form and perception were … the same”, and trace the contours and textures of loss, the way longing sets birds “circling”, and green is “inconsolable”. And yet elegy is not the only key: there are celebrations, too, exhilarations of surface, colour, voices on and in the body.

Bloom brings the human and its various others – the weathers, weeds, flowers and creatures - into delicate focus, attending to their forms and relationships with tender precision and great care.

⎯ Mina Gorji

“With humility, reflectiveness, and careful attunement to her surroundings, Westcott calls for her readers to stop and contemplate the wonders of the natural world. Her language is tender and vivid … . At the same time, Westcott reveals a deep awareness of her own body. She writes intelligently about womanhood and nature, sometimes weaving the two together: “There are parts of our bodies we will never know,” she realizes, and later, “The weather is inside me, blue skies in lemur country.” These poems describe ordinary moments made noteworthy by the poet’s good eye and deft imagery. “All beginnings are naïve,” she writes, and, in this collection, her curiosity proves contagious. ”

— Maggie Wang, The Harvard Review

Westcott’s observations on nature and its relationship to the self emphasise clarity and detail, but there’s also a sense of ecstasy to the writing that elevates the work to an almost hallucinatory level. She has the ability to take a Blakean sense of wonder, and recharge it into something common and human and identifiable, rather than labouring a kind of lazy visionary excess.

— Daniel Bennett, Wild Court

…it feels wrong or inadequate to simply call Westcott a nature or eco poet because those ring- fenced terms don’t account for how these eerie and sensuous poems operate beyond the flora and fauna that make up their content. Westcott is really interested in how we, human beings, can resemble other facets of nature.

Water, for instance, is a major motif in the collection and is sometimes the purveyor of a surprising erotic charge. So much so that even the marks made by modern machines are rendered into something almost sentient that echoes the organic root of life.

— Dzifa Benson, Magma 82

The poems are open, elastic spaces, where room is created for uncertainty and the fullness of the natural world’s complexity, all the while carefully, precisely describing the body’s experience in its encounters with birdsong, plants, others, animals, seeds – the poet is part explorer in the long grass, part shaman of small things. I relish Bloom’s rich mouthfuls of poems and return again to the book as you would a beloved garden throughout its seasons.

⎯ Jane Wilkinson, Poetry Society Poets’ Books of the Year, 2021

This second of Westcott’s ‘sister’ collections shows us a powerful nature poet unafraid of a bolder reach in expression, where we are ‘one layer of carbon’ among so many others in nature, grounded in the particularity and exactitude of that world.

⎯ Ken Evans, The Manchester Review

The quietism that distinguishes Bloom’s instinctual observations has unique power and purpose, and is in accord with both the sensual and the sacral; the poems have perfect pitch. The natural world is perceived as full of intuitive energy, a faithful mirror to human experience. Every shimmering perception holds its nerve. Flowers and plants, weathers and all growing things are allied to woman’s experience, to menstruation and motherhood, in a profound meditation upon life’s joys and forfeits. The physical world of body and bloom is alive and present here, the language lifting from the page as if bathed in holy water.

— Penelope Shuttle and Togara Muzanenhamo, judges, Ledbury Hellens Poetry Prize